Monday 20 November 2000 21.26 EST
First published on Monday 20 November 2000 21.26 EST

The American presidency is a very big deal. In electoral politics there's no bigger deal in the world. The drives towards it of Al Gore and George W Bush have been different. For Gore the presidency is something he has been seeking with fixated energy for at least 20 years, through an apprenticeship in Congress and then eight years as vice-president. For Bush the urge has not been there so long. He discovered a political career only in mid-life, and still appears to be the vessel for other people's ambition as much as his own. But for both, the battle to establish which of them got the highest number of honest votes in Florida now puts their very lives as public men on the line.

The scale of what's at stake also impresses the American people. There is little apparent resentment at what is going on. The emblematic image of election 2000 will always be that of three exhausted ordinary citizens in Palm Beach county, peering at a voting card back and front, up and down, as if reading the runes in search of a message they know no other way to divine. Such is the American respect for process that the prospect of this being done 6m times, a hand count of the complete Florida vote, is not appalling. Normal life carries on. Stable countries survive chronic political uncertainty, their economies booming, for a long time. Look at Italy.

On the other hand, this can't go on for ever. Short of the supreme court justices counting those 6m votes themselves, there will always be complaints of bias, negligence or fraud. Any outcome will be imperfect. But there has to be finality somewhere, a point that puts Al Gore to the hardest question. He is, after all, the demandeur . On the counts so far, he has always been behind. At some point he runs the risk of being seen as the pedantic and vexatious litigant who is determined to place on Florida the entire weight of electoral imperfections that could surely be turned up in every other state by anyone motivated to try hard enough to do so.

Politically, moreover, he faces the beginnings of a split with his party. His personal interest is totally in the battle. If he doesn't win this one, after squandering huge advantages, he will not be seen again. But for the Democratic party, the gains from a president elected by nit-picking, chad-challenging legal manoeuvres are reaching expiry point. Democrats now see some advantage in the installation of Bush as the weakest president for more than a century.

For one thing, he would be able to do very little. The signal that America was turning its back on Clintonism has already been effaced by these weeks of incorrigible ambiguity - a point, incidentally, that removes from William Hague any chance of a Bush presidency announcing a global resurrection of the right. Bush can make it to the White House only as damaged goods. He will have neither the votes nor the mandate of a plurality, which every other president since 1876 has had.

This weakness will be made worse not better by the Republicans' control of Congress. On the face of it, a weak Republican president and a razor-thin majority for his party on the Hill should shore each other up and deliver a programme. In practice this will not happen. Moderation, to the point of impasse, will transfer from a split electorate to a hung Congress. The Republicans' hold on both the political organs of the state will deprive the party of any alibis, as it grapples with an economic downturn and fails to enact the domestic agenda, especially the tax cuts Bush promised in the campaign. He will have responsibility without power, the prerogative of the loser throughout the ages.

So, as well as Bush's manifest personal inadequacies, gridlock beckons. The same fate would befall Gore. But it was Bush who promised the end of those terrible Washington games, and vowed to coax into being an era when politics turned clean and effective. He will get an early opportunity to feel his words being stuffed down his throat, and will find whatever healing powers he has obliterated by the clear awareness that, in these fateful circumstances, the country is likely to repay an impotent Dubya by punishing his party at the 2002 Congressional elections, with the 2004 presidency to follow. The Democrats, in short, will not play ball.

Such is a logical Democrat calculation. Very soon it may prove to be a convenient rationalising of the inevitable. If the Florida supreme court's response to yesterday's titanic legal encounter is to invalidate any hand recounting, then Bush should be home, unless the Gore people's righteousness drives them to yet more legal challenges, or possibly to make the case for interfering with the normal protocols of the electoral college. But equally, if the court decides not to move decisively in that direction, Gore should still be thinking hard about whether victory is worth having, out of a court process that will attract enough challenges to delegitimise its outcome in the eyes of many people, whatever recount is done.

I f the point now at issue were the several thousand votes clearly handed in error to Pat Buchanan, it might be a different story. But that is no longer the frontline battle. Instead we have those puzzled scrutinies of chad holes by good but partisan people who have been told they can do a better job than machines. The moral of this extraordinary story is plainly that there needs to be an American version of electoral reform, starting with mass re-tendering for the supply of efficient voting machines: less obviously that Al Gore will have made an unanswerable case for having overtaken George W Bush as the heir to presidential legitimacy.

A Bush presidency, though neutered by this history, would be an unattractive prospect. As argued here before, it would be especially alarming to America's allies and counterparts in global geopolitics. There are enough foolish Washington strategists hooked on a national missile defence system to encourage the president to take forward this guarantor of instability. There will be some repellent constituencies, pro-gun and anti-environment, to satisfy. The Republicans would have all the patronage, starting with maybe a quarter of the supreme court. To Democrats generally this would mark a transition as bitter as it would be terminal to Gore himself.

But little of enduring substance could happen before 2002. The presidency will lack potency as well as grandeur, which means most of its moral authority. That's true of either man for sure, and it's something the rest of the world will have as many reasons to regret as to applaud. Meanwhile, the virtues of a domestic impasse ought to be becoming clearer to the Democrats, to balance against the polluted victory that would be the best their man could claim.

Gore didn't win the election in the way he had every chance of doing. He could take with him into oblivion the moral victory of the popular vote. But there comes a time when victory by lawyers, with lawyers, for barely half the people, is not worth having - and that time is probably going to be this week.